Word: transistor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Until recently the public has had no chance to try them out; transistors are hard to manufacture and are much in demand by the military. But last week Son-otone Corp. put on the market a partially "transistorized" hearing aid. Only one of its three miniature tubes has been replaced by a transistor, but Sonotone claims that the gadget "will give double the power of any comparable instrument, at half the operating cost...
When scientists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories produced the first germanium transistor, they knew they had found a long-awaited short cut through the great glass jungle of the electronics age (TIME, Feb. 11). With the ease of the old-fashioned carborundum crystal, it can change alternating current to direct; and like a vacuum tube, it can amplify faint, fluctuating currents. But where the vacuum tube is often bulky, fragile and uses large amounts of power, the rugged little transistor, no bigger than a thumbnail, works on minute amounts of energy. Last week in Princeton, N.J., the Radio Corp...
...transistor portable radio that can operate for 100 hours from five tiny batteries...
Magic Trifle. Bell Laboratory has a two-stage transistor amplifier, complete with resistors and condensers, that is potted in a cylinder of plastic as big as a ¾-inch section cut from a fountain pen. When a faint voice current is fed to this trifle, it gives a signal loud enough to blast the eardrum. Scores of such amplifiers could be packed in a coffee can. One device at Bell has transistors that do the work of 44 vacuum tubes. The whole thing is housed on a panel no bigger than the page of a novel...
...Transistor enthusiasts speak of the future with electronic ecstasy. Replacing vacuum tubes, they say, is not the whole story: transistors will be far more versatile than vacuum tubes. There may be transistor amplifiers in telephone receivers. Airplanes and guided missiles can carry electronic equipment that is now too heavy and fragile. Transistors will give a new impetus to development of electronic-control apparatus for automatic factories. Perhaps the most exciting possibility is in the rapidly growing field of electronic computers. Transistors can be built, theoretically, almost as small as the neurons (nerve cells) that serve as relays in the human...